Track IP Address using DD-WRT + CRON + WGET

After moving to my new apartment, it was time to dust off the old Linksys router I had lying around. This thing has been hacked to run the latest DD-WRT that it could handle.

My network address changes occasionally, and I didn’t want to setup any dyndns accounts to keep track of the IP and have it resolve to a hostname. Honestly, just being able to get the last IP address is good enough for me.

So, I came up with this script that I run on one of my websites which listens for HTTP requests. When it gets one, it simply logs the IP to a file and spits it back out to the client.

Then, whenever I want to grab the IP address of the home network, I just hit another URL to grab the IP. The script is requested from my router every hour.

Configuration

Open your DD-WRT settings, go to Administration | Management, and scroll down till you see the section on CRON. You can add the following rule to have your router grab the file every hour:

Obtaining IP

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Thomas is the author of Advanced Microservices and a prolific public speaker with a passion for reducing complex problems into simple language and diagrams. His career includes working at Fortune 50's in the Midwest, co-founding a successful startup, and everything in between.